Types of damage mechanic is poorly developed

[マルコ]

Just wanted to share with you guys something I haven't liked since the first Darksouls, which is the fact you have all this damage types but then the game doesn't give you a way to investigate and discover enemies vulnerabilities.
In Elden Ring this could be achieved in a very organic way similar to the witcher 3 in which you buy a book about a monster and learn its weaknesses, or maybe a dedicated spell that reveals them or an NPC which can sense this things.
The problem with having them hidden is that likely the vast majority of players will stick with 1 main weapon for every boss and grind it until it dies instead. Likely a smaller portion of players will check the vulnerability on the wiki (which I hate and don't do since it breaks immersion) and a smaller portion still will try attacks with all the element to figure out the vulnerability before attempting the fight for real.
So this is a waste of potential in my opinion, makes one ignore an otherwise fun part of the game and feel like something they do because they always made it like this rather than for some particular reason.
How do you guys feel about the hidden vulnerabilities and the need of a wiki if you want to leverage those (in a reasonable way)?

[Tikus Tycoon]

Souls games dont guide much. It's always been like that. I love it and dont mind use wiki.

[Senki]

Yeah I always hate hidden information, especially when it is important. Some weaknesses are obvious but others aren't at all. Having to use the wiki isn't that hard but like you said it breaks immersion. A tab in the game with this info would've been better.

[Tikus Tycoon]

It's always been like that and most just try to fimd weaknesse on their own bec it's fun to find the mistery to kill a boss. This is a game in it's own style and i respect that.

[Toad]

From a gameplay perspective, it's extremely obtuse. I understand they really like being vague with the storytelling and lore, but carrying that over to basic damage calculations and even just trying to parse what the description is actually saying is annoying.

People who like to datamine and run extensive in-game testing on things probably get some enjoyment out of it, but as someone who just wants to try and optimise the things I'm picking up on a first run, it feels impenetrable.

[Señor Brown]

It's alright, as you can discover some of the necessary vulnerabilities yourself (i.e. miners).

[Professor Hugedix]

Fine as is, imo. If the series were more in your face about the different damage types and their strengths and weaknesses, it would encourage people of a certain mindset to have several backup weapons all upgraded to the same level as their main, which is at odds with upgrade materials being somewhat hard to obtain. Making yourself weaker overall just for the chance that you might be super effective against one specific enemy type is not a good idea, so keeping damage type vulnerabilities largely hidden except for a few edge cases where it's obvious seems to be an intentional design decision.

[Tikus Tycoon]

I used to play single player only since many yrs.

Took me months to understand anything when i first played ds2 (ds1 original didnt work well). The figuringout things were what got me hooked, didnt even realized i could look up wiki, and ds3 was the game i first went online in my life and learnt i could look up things or just asked.

I wiki when im totally stuck. But yeah some dont like it, but again, this is how soulsbourne is.

[Dollmaker]

What i find dumber is how they handled Holy, cause just about every important boss is resistant to it.

Mohg, Malenia, Godrick, Morgott, Radagon, Maliketh, Elden Beast, etc.

[CirceTheSiren]

seeing the amount of poise damage for a skill or spell even as an letter would be almost all i really urgently need.

[IchigoMait]

Nice, all valid points. Problem is that there are too many peeps who just brute forced it or just use a wiki, and the rest test it out one by one, like me doing at the back of forth against an elder bat to find out what weapon interrupts an enemy the most without the enemy being able to retaliate the least amount of times, or not at all if they're squishy enough. (claws/fists for the win, second best thrusting weapons and then colossal types, also mind that bleed, frost and such resets the stun animation or stagger from similar dots)

[Tikus Tycoon]

Nothing wrong with wiki-ing. What is wrong is looking down on others who just there enjoying their life playing video games however they like and they prob dont even think how others wanna play bec they love gaming and actually enjoying the game having fun to the fullest.

[ressenmacher]

Agreed.

When the obviously undead dragon, the dragon corrupted by deathroot, the dragon associated with the guy behind the undead plague who have "weak to holy" marked in basically every single holy item, incantation, and weapon description, is 80% resistant to it, I think the game needs to step back and consider whether it's doing a good enough job at making weaknesses intuitive or not.

[JustDodgeTheLag 4Head]

Another thing Bloodborne fixed and did better than the rest of other souls games.

You have either "Kin" or "Beast", aka, righteous or serrated bonus damage type to those groups, then fire or bolt, that's it. (blunt/pierce etc... are usually not that important)

As you may see, it's not difficult to know if the mob/boss you are about to fight is a "Beast" or a "Kin", and thus, already know if you will have that bonus with your weapons, then, you can just use fire or bolt paper on your weapon to see what does the most damage (knowing that "Beast" usually are weaker to fire).

It should also be precised that it is a bonus, which mean you don't get disadvantaged if you stick to your favorite weapon, which is again a better "game design" decision that being forced to change your main weapon when reaching end game because suddenly every late bosses are resistant to the main damage of your build.

All in all, everything make sense without having to spend hours to test things (which 99% of the playerbase won't do) or to constantly read the guide, it's again why Bloodborne is FARRRRRRRRRRRR better than Elden Ring.

Why do FROM cannot learn from their previous games is a mystery for me.

[ressenmacher]

Originally posted by KEK:

Another thing Bloodborne fixed and did better than the rest of other souls games.

You have either "Kin" or "Beast", aka, righteous or serrated bonus damage type to those groups, then fire or bolt, that's it. (blunt/pierce etc... are usually not that important)

As you may see, it's not difficult to know if the mob/boss you are about to fight is a "Beast" or a "Kin", and thus, already know if you will have that bonus with your weapons, then, you can just use fire or bolt paper on your weapon to see what does the most damage (knowing that "Beast" usually are weaker to fire).

This is a very salient point; something like this was done with the skellies, but it would have been interesting to see more enemies grouped into hierarchical types that share common weaknesses so you didn't have to do all that testing.

Also, Thrust vs Blunt was very very important. Kin (and a lot of other things) took massively more damage to thrust weapons than any other form of physical attack. Actually, iirc the dataminers found that there wasn't a single enemy in the entire game with lower blunt res than thrust, funnily enough.

[vamirez]

Originally posted by ressenmacher:

Originally posted by KEK:

Another thing Bloodborne fixed and did better than the rest of other souls games.

You have either "Kin" or "Beast", aka, righteous or serrated bonus damage type to those groups, then fire or bolt, that's it. (blunt/pierce etc... are usually not that important)

As you may see, it's not difficult to know if the mob/boss you are about to fight is a "Beast" or a "Kin", and thus, already know if you will have that bonus with your weapons, then, you can just use fire or bolt paper on your weapon to see what does the most damage (knowing that "Beast" usually are weaker to fire).

This is a very salient point; something like this was done with the skellies, but it would have been interesting to see more enemies grouped into hierarchical types that share common weaknesses so you didn't have to do all that testing.

Also, Thrust vs Blunt was very very important. Kin (and a lot of other things) took massively more damage to thrust weapons than any other form of physical attack. Actually, iirc the dataminers found that there wasn't a single enemy in the entire game with lower blunt res than thrust, funnily enough.

Just some thoughts: Bloodborne had a lore focus on hunting monsters, i.e. it made a lot of sense to have these very specific types and weaknesses. ER is a generic RPG-type where different creatures will have different sets of resistances. However, they are not always logical if you apply "pen & paper common sense", i.e. all skeletons should be immune to poison. Lorewise some do make sense, however, such as some of the bosses being resistant to holy as that is the damage/power type of the Erdtree, and "those who live in death" being weak to it, in general.